Consider the following class for an overloaded pretty printer. For atomic data (numeric types, String etc.) one would implement prettyShow, for complex data either pretty or prettyPrec.
> import Text.PrettyPrint > > class Pretty a where > pretty :: a -> Doc > prettyShow :: a -> String > prettyPrec :: Int -> a -> Doc Implementing one of these methods should be enough, giving default implementations for the other two. It is easy to get prettyShow and prettyPrec from pretty. > prettyShow = render . pretty > prettyPrec = const . pretty However, to define pretty from one of the others, I need two default implementations. > pretty = text . prettyShow > pretty = prettyPrec 0 Is there a way to get this to work? Workarounds (not entirely satisfactory): Technically, one could define a cycle of default implementations. Alternative 1: > pretty = prettyPrec 0 > prettyShow = render . pretty > prettyPrec _ = text . prettyShow Problem: Here, if pretty is defined, > prettyPrec _ = text . render . pretty instead of just > prettyPrec _ = pretty and (text . render) is not the identity (destroys inner document structure). Alternative 2: > pretty = text . prettyShow > prettyShow = render . prettyPrec 0 > prettyPrec _ = pretty Problem: Here, if prettyPrec is defined, > pretty = text . render . prettyPrec 0 instead of just > pretty = prettyPrec 0 I guess alternative 2 is worse than alternative 1, as one would usually define prettyPrec to get pretty, and not the otherway round. But none of these two alternatives really does the job. -- Andreas Abel <>< Du bist der geliebte Mensch. Department of Computer Science and Engineering Chalmers and Gothenburg University, Sweden andreas.a...@gu.se http://www2.tcs.ifi.lmu.de/~abel/ _______________________________________________ Haskell-prime mailing list Haskell-prime@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime
